In the wooded outskirts of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a perplexed landlord noticed odd sights at two of his rental properties. Tenants wore long black coats and parked box trucks outside the duplexes. They ran an electrical cord from one box truck into one of the condos, and kept a stretcher inside another. A neighbor remembers similarly dressed figures walking around at night holding hands, per the AP. They never spoke a word. By the time the FBI searched the property last week, one of the most recent tenants had been killed in a shootout with US Border Patrol agents in Vermont, and a second was under arrest. A third, a shadowy figure known online as "Ziz," remains missing after authorities linked their cult-like group to six deaths in three states.
Officials have offered few details of the cross-country investigation, which broke open after the Jan. 20 shooting death of a Border Patrol trooper in Vermont during a traffic stop. Associated Press interviews and a review of court records and online postings tell the story of how a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists, most of them in their 20s and 30s, met online, shared anarchist beliefs, and became increasingly violent. Their goals aren't clear, but online writings span topics from radical veganism and gender identity to artificial intelligence. At the middle of it all is "Ziz," who appears to be the leader of the strange group, who called themselves "Zizians." She has been seen near multiple crime scenes and has connections to various suspects.
Who is Ziz? Jack LaSota moved to the San Francisco Bay area after earning a computer science degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2013 and interning at NASA, according to a profile on a hiring site for programmers, coders, and other freelance workers. NASA officials did not respond to a request to confirm LaSota's internship, but a Jack LaSota is listed on a website about past interns. In 2016, LaSota began publishing a dark and rambling blog under the name Ziz, describing a theory in which the two hemispheres of the brain could hold separate values and genders and "often desire to kill each other." LaSota used she/her pronouns, and in her writings says she is a transgender woman.
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Ziz railed against perceived enemies, including so-called rationalist groups, which operate mostly online and seek to understand human cognition through reason and knowledge. Some are concerned with the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. She began promoting an extreme mix of rationalism, ethical veganism, anarchism, and other value systems, said Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who met LaSota both in person and online. Taylor said Ziz adherents (described as "extremely vulnerable" by another in the story) use the rationalist ideology as a reason to commit violence. "Stuff like, thinking it's reasonable to avoid paying rent and defend oneself from being evicted," said Taylor. Police say it gets far more violent than that. (Read the full story for the details.)
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